Finding faint targets with Star adventurer and 135mm lens

[ddm4313]

I find finding faint  targets pretty tough, last night I was searching for M3 and ended up accidentally stumbling upon M51. How do you find? People talk about plate solving but nova.astrometry takes a few times, ASTAP not working very well.

[Space Oddities]

Are you using an aiming device, like a red dot finder? Back when I had a similar mount, it was very helpful to see where I'm pointing at. Using a planetarium and star hopping generally did the trick, although it did take some time!

If you're on a Windows computer, you could use AstroTortilla together with Stellarium to see where your scope is pointing at. The advantage is that AstroTortilla can download star catalogs, and it is therefore much faster than uploading the data to Astrometry.net and waiting for the result. And it can sync with Stellarium so that you see how close you are.

There's a tutorial on how to configure both AstroTortilla and Stellarium, it might take some time, but is probably worth it!

https://www.lightvortexastronomy.com/tutorial-setting-up-and-using-astrotortilla-for-plate-solving.html

[dannybgoode]

Having faffed about with APT, Nebulosity and various other Windows based packages I moved across to an RPi4 running Astroberry and absolutely love it.  Plate solving is near instant each iteration and to watch the scope go from park, poddle off and find the target, centre it perfectly and begin a sequence is still magic to me  .

Of course the nice thing about Astroberry is that it is free as well - you just need a Raspberry Pi to run it on...

[theropod]

5 minutes ago, dannybgoode said:

Having faffed about with APT, Nebulosity and various other Windows based packages I moved across to an RPi4 running Astroberry and absolutely love it.  Plate solving is near instant each iteration and to watch the scope go from park, poddle off and find the target, centre it perfectly and begin a sequence is still magic to me  .

Of course the nice thing about Astroberry is that it is free as well - you just need a Raspberry Pi to run it on...

Great post. Will you please start, if you haven’t already, a thread to document what you did? It would be a good archive and informative to interested parties short on clairvoyance. Heh, like me. If there is a means by which I can make my EQM 35 do this I will reach nirvana. Frankly the synsan handset alignment on specific stars is a a royal pain. Even after using an illuminated dual crosshair eyepiece, and nailing the stars, the mount is several degrees off. Yes, my polar alignment is spot on. When I try a goto operation without the 3 star alignment it’s almost the same as if I did. If my situation doesn’t call for a touch more tech I can’t imagine one that does. Please expound on your adventures into Pi land.

[dannybgoode]

4 minutes ago, theropod said:

Great post. Will you please start, if you haven’t already, a thread to document what you did? It would be a good archive and informative to interested parties short on clairvoyance. Heh, like me. If there is a means by which I can make my EQM 35 do this I will reach nirvana. Frankly the synsan handset alignment on specific stars is a a royal pain. Even after using an illuminated dual crosshair eyepiece, and nailing the stars, the mount is several degrees off. Yes, my polar alignment is spot on. When I try a goto operation without the 3 star alignment it’s almost the same as if I did. If my situation doesn’t call for a touch more tech I can’t imagine one that does. Please expound on your adventures into Pi land.

You need an EQDir cable for a start.  I have linked to one from a UK seller but note you are in the States so this is just so you know what you are looking for:

 

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/astronomy-cables-leads-accessories/lynx-astro-ftdi-eqdir-usb-adapter-for-sky-watcher-eq5-pro-heq5-syntrek-pro-az-eq5-gt-az-eq6-gt-and-eq8-mounts.html

This plugs into your mount instead of the handset and allows a computer to control the mount.

Then you need a Raspberry Pi and the Astroberry software:

https://www.astroberry.io/

Which you then flash to an SD card using balenaEtcher:

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

From there you stick the SD card in the RPi (I'd recommend an RPi4 but at the least an RPi3) and let it load up and then you log in, launch KStars and then EKOS and pretty much just use the dropdown selections for your mount, camera etc.  

There are some excellent YouTube videos on how to use it fully but one of the features is you use KStars to point your scope at a chosen target and then tell EKOS to plate solve and away it goes and does its stuff.  Nails it every time.  Note though you do need a camera attached as it takes an image of the sky, looks that image up in a database to work out where it is pointing and compares this to where it should be pointing and adjusts accordingly.  You cannot do it just with an eyepiece as the software has no reference points.

I have set up my guidecam so that it will plate solve when I am using my main scope for visual instead of imaging and it works well. 

[theropod]

The above. Copied to text file. Sounds doable. Thanks!